I’m seriously annoyed by “x is the new y” being used as an explanation for anything.
To elaborate: I come from an old family. Not old in coming-over-on-the-Mayflower old; old as in the sense of me being the youngest child of the youngest child in a family where every other sibling had kids at 20 while my parents had kids at 40.
As a result, I have some really old cousins.
One of them just celebrated his 70th birthday and came to Wisconsin from Montana, his four-year-old son in tow.
(Lest you get entirely the wrong idea, his oldest son is 48.)
I couldn’t stay long at his birthday party, but I did sneak a peek at his cake. “70 is the new 30” was written in black icing across the white frosting.
Well, no. Seventy is not the new 30. Seventy is 70. It may be a more active 70 (and in the case of my cousin, more of an active 70 than he may have bargained for), but it’s still 70. Turning your back on the truth in the interest of creating a slogan accomplishes nothing.
Fine, but it’s hardly worth the while of even something as base-level as a blog to get bent out of shape over icing on a cake. What’s up?
This: Free is the new pay-for.
You know where I’m coming from on this: So much more of what we do as marketers has to do with giving away stuff. And if not stuff, money.
We fritter away gobs of time figuring out what to give away, the channels to give it through, and who best to give it to, all in the interest of selling something to someone at some point down the road, and I think the whole process has gone too far.
Not to bite the hand that fed me canned spaghetti for a decade, but the most egregious example of this is publishing. Many publishers give away all their product online to anyone in hopes that someone might click on a link somewhere – just click on a link, mind you – and justify the price the publisher charges for a banner ad.
That might be the worst revenue model ever. It’s like driving to Las Vegas and putting everything on 27 red. It makes the let-me-sell-your-stuff-on-eBay model look better than Amway.
The most recent example of this came today, with the news that makers of online subscription-based games are going to waive the subscription fee and charge for upgrades within the game itself.
In other words, your character is free, but he’s a schmuck. Lifting him out of schmuckdom costs money.
As an alternate revenue model, that makes sense – assuming the game-makers investigated thoroughly and determined there was no way of charging on the front end and making real money selling virtual armor to virtual warriors. (I understand the revenue model and know it works, but it still blows my mind.)
If the game-makers didn’t ask that question, shame on them. Who knows? They might have been able to charge a one-time $10 fee and become the sole distributors of virtual rocket-powered maces.
Another unrelated example. In the topsy-turvy world of trading cards, the cards we gave away to promote a product usually wound up being worth more than the card set they were promoting. At the height of this phenomenon, the promo-card lines at the National Sports Collectors Convention extended outside the exhibit hall and around the convention center – and the sets these cards were promoting were sleeping with the fishes.
The promo cards did their job; they promoted their respective sets. Problem was, through their perceived scarcity they assumed the value and collectibility of the sets they were promoting. There was nothing left for the product being sold.
Figuring out what and how much to give in promotion of a product isn’t nearly as easy as it seems – especially in an online environment, where if you’re not giving away tangibles to sell intangibles you’re dealing with expectations that your branded app should be free, your content and creative should be free, your coupons should be free, and your trial subs should be free.
Enough, I say. Here are my ground rules for determining what to give away in a world that demands free yet shows an amazing ability to acquiesce and pay the price.
First, respect the product. I used to be a product-is-cheap-give-it-away guy until I read the marvelous book Once They Heard The Cheers by W.C. Heinz. Heinz revisited an old boxing trainer named Jack Hurley who was bemoaning the effect television was having on boxing. “They don’t respect the product any more, the way they’re giving it away,” he said, and in the case of boxing he was right. Opening up boxing to the masses, putting it on TV and giving it away, killed it as a spectator sport.
Maybe boxing was doomed either way, because if it didn’t take to the airwaves people would have stayed away from the fights anyway and watched whatever was on the box, but at least then the product would have had integrity. It would still have been boxing, not a show called boxing. Matches would not have been made because they look good on TV.
Fast-forward to now. Never lose sight of what you’re trying to sell, and give away or discount as little of that as possible. Giving away complementary items is acceptable if you’re absolutely positive you can’t sell them. Giving away the stick to sell the razor blades is fine, but if you can sell the stick too, so much the better.
(Preview of coming attractions: Giving away the e-reader – but not the iPad – to sell the e-book. Bad idea. Death of Kindle.)
I know this is hard in the case of startups; after all, how are you going to tell the world how much better your mousetrap is if no one uses it to catch mice? Well, you can demonstrate, you can blog, you can set up a MousetrapCam to show your product in action, you can run focus groups -- you have many more options than you might think.
Second, respect your audience. They expect to pay for things of value. Fulfill that expectation by showing the value. As part of a Super Bowl promotion Denny’s gave away Grand Slam breakfasts to show they were a good value. The only problem is, Grand Slam breakfasts were a good value before Denny’s gave them away. Were they a better value afterward? Denny’s subsequent giveaway-free ad campaign, overwrought as it was, still did a better job of showing the core value in eating at Denny’s: You get a lot of good, plain food for cheap. Giving away several million breakfasts got Denny’s nowhere down that road.
Next, be honest about the probable end result. For a time last year, eMusic gave away 50 free downloads in virtually every consumer product. The downloads came attached to a monthly subscription, but it was no problem to sign up using one credit card and e-mail address, download your 50 free songs, cancel your membership, sign up using a different credit card and e-mail address, download 50 more songs, cancel that membership, and continue down the line as long as the credit cards and e-mail addresses held out.
eMusic was thinking the giveaways would generate more subscriptions when in reality they generated more giveaways. If you hand out chocolate bars to everyone who stands in line, how many people will buy chocolate bars and how many will get back in line?
Finally, take the long view. Will the fact that you gave away 5 million chocolate bars in January mean anything to sales in December? Think about the most notable large-scale giveaways of the last 12 to 18 months: eMusic, Denny’s, Kentucky Grilled Chicken. Are any of them not struggling? Think about TV game shows and the cars they give away. Are they not the cars that aren’t selling? And do they sell any better after they’ve been given away? It only seems like a solution.
Is free the new pay-for? Absolutely not. Free is the refuge of the timid marketer unwilling to ask buyers to pay their far share.
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